Patch 5.1: Item Upgrades
Patch 5.1 will finally implement the item upgrade system that first appeared in beta. The same frame is being used now, with a background that matches the other Ethereal frames, making it likely that this will be another function performed by our Ethereal friends. The window title still says Valor Upgrade, but the game has support for Valor, Conquest, Justice, and Honor points upgrades.

It appears all items that are upgradeable can be upgraded by 8 item levels, but Conquest and Valor points will do it in two steps rather than all at once. The currency used to upgrade an item is set per item, so you cannot use Honor to upgrade Valor Points gear or any other type than what is set for the item.

Important:There are a lot of details missing about how the system works, it is not intended to be tested yet, and the values are not final!

Heart of Fear Progression
After a few days of progression, there are now 72 guilds that have cleared the Heart of Fear raid on Normal difficulty, with Duality (US-Zul'jin) grabbing the first clear. Heroic progression starts next week, along with the first half of LFR.

The latest Normal difficulty Mists of Pandaria Raid Dungeon is now available: Heart of Fear. Raid Finder and Heroic difficulties will be available Wednesday, November 7.

Raid Finder will unlock bosses in Heart of Fear over time, and all Heart of Fear bosses will be unlocked and available Wednesday, November 14. To access the new Raid Finder dungeons, you will need a minimum item level (ilevel) requirement of 470.

Here is the current schedule for these Raid releases:

Wednesday, October 31 – Normal Heart of Fear

Wednesday, November 7 – Heroic Heart of Fear and first half of Heart of Fear on Raid Finder

Wednesday,November 14 – Second half of Heart of Fear on Raid Finder and Normal Terrace of Endless Spring

All raids/difficulties will still be fully accessible by November 21, as we had always intended, but we’re staggering the release a bit more.

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Hotfix Timing
The hotfix list posted covers a pretty large window of time (October 26 - Nov 1, as stated). The Jasper Chains change on Stone Guard was made at the end of last week, and corrected the fact that the ability was being cast with roughly the same frequency on 10-player as on 25-player mode. This meant that an entire 10-player raid could quickly find themselves chained to each other, while a majority of a 25-player group would still have been unfettered after the same amount of time. That was never our intent.

Now, as for the Garalon hotfixes, the Mend Leg hotfix was made on Tuesday afternoon, before more than a few dozen people in the world had seen the encounter at all, and certainly before any guilds had defeated it. The berserk hotfix was enacted the following morning. Ultimately, both of these hotfixes were intended to bring the DPS requirement down to an appropriate level for a Normal mode encounter halfway through the zone. Normal mode encounters should be reasonably beatable using available Normal mode gear; we were seeing Heroic-caliber guilds with a significant number of ilvl 502 items (from Heroic Mogu’shan, and more powerful than the handful of 496 epics available from the first two bosses of Heart of Fear) struggling to meet the berserk timer on the fight. We made an adjustment accordingly, and we feel that Garalon remains a step up in difficulty from the prior two encounters in the zone.

Our rationale regarding avoiding midweek hotfixes that make a fight easier only applies to Heroic encounters: When a guild encounters a Heroic boss that seems excessively difficult, they may opt to defeat it on Normal and move on. If we make the fight easier midweek, they don’t have the option to go back and fight that easier version, and that can be frustrating and seem unfair. A Normal mode brick wall is a brick wall regardless, so there is no such potential unfairness. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Reins of the Raven Lord Drop Rate
If you are still looking for Reins of the Raven Lord Lord it's still in the game. Got it as a drop a few days ago.

Could be a bug if the mount is not listed as a drop on the Dungeon Journal. It should be reported to our Bug Report forum. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Account-Wide Cloud Serpent Riding
Some account-wide mounts have restrictions based on profession, faction, or class. In this instance, cloud serpents have a factional requirement. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

LFR FeedbackYou are gimping your raid group by not running it. I'm sick of feeling that I have to suffer through the mess that is LFR each and every week. Blizzard made 10 and 25s share a lockout because 25 man guilds were "forced" into running the lower skilled 10s for extra gear each week. This new system is no different but 100x worse due to the nature of LFR.
Actually, the new system is quite a bit different than the 10- and 25-player lockout situation. A much greater percentage of the population will experience each new raid using Raid Finder, compared to normal and (especially) Heroic difficulties. The loot system is vastly different in Raid Finder to account for matchmade players, the dungeons are often split up differently for LFR (i.e. Dragon Soul in two parts), and the quality of loot that drops is lower. Given all of this, the cons largely outweigh the pros in your suggestion to make all difficulties of a raid dungeon share lockouts.

But let's discuss the issue you raise: "I run raid content in an organized group. I don't want to do LFR on top of my normal raiding, but I feel like I have to if I want to gear up as fast as possible."

The statement might be true for some, but I have a lot of follow-ups.

Are you in a guild that has success with Heroic raid progression? This one's pretty important, as any guild that's good enough to be farming, or at least killing several bosses in, Heroic Mogu'shan Vaults and Heart of Fear by the time Terrace of Endless Spring opens via LFR, will not likely need a single piece of gear from LFR. Terrace of Endless Spring LFR items won't be as good as your Heroic raid gear.

Is your guild demanding that you run LFR every week for the chance at some upgrades you haven't made via normal difficulty yet? In your post you say we're forcing you into LFR, but that's not true. I won't argue semantics, but if you're min/maxing your character for every competitive edge possible, that's a playstyle choice.

How badly are you really hurting your raid by not running LFR? Is your progression in normal difficulty such that upgrading from a piece of ilvl 463 gear to 476 gear is "make or break" for the entire raid? With stat inflation, the difference between these item levels is almost negligible, unless you're comparing full sets. But in the amount of time it might take you to get several upgrades via LFR, you should be getting several upgrades via normal difficulty -- and you get a head start on normal difficulty with Raid Finder always releasing at least a week later.

Certainly there's a psychology to hunting down every advantage you can, and the endgame is largely about that. But there are a lot of nuances in the raid progression system to ensure that:

A) Raid Finder has a healthy pool of players from which to choose

B) Organized raiders who regularly tackle Heroic difficulty will have virtually no need to run Raid Finder much at all this expansion (since a new tier's LFR ilvl won't outdo the previous tier's Heroic ilvl)

C) Organized raiders who make progress each week on normal difficulty shouldn't hit any pass/fail gear checks and lose because they're not running LFR every week.

D) You're not forced by the game (AT ALL) to keep running LFR each week for gear if you want to be successful in the higher difficulties.

I asked a lot of questions because you're demanding a very dramatic change to the game, but you've shared almost no details regarding why this change is completely necessary for everyone, and you're posting on an account that gives me absolutely no insight into your level-90 progression.

My point is that everyone including you has now said there is no need to run LFR and Normal each week, so why would any normal mode raider care that they could only do normal modes over LFR difficulties each week?
Mmm.. That's not quite what people are arguing -- at least that's not what I'm arguing.

Yes, I'm saying the game isn't set up so that you'll fail in normal/Heroic raids, if you're not running LFR every lockout as well. But now it sounds like your argument is: "If LFR isn't required for normal progression, no one should care if they share lockouts."

That's very flawed.

You first said we're literally forcing you to do LFR to progress. I pointed out that you're not actually forced to do it, in that you shouldn't hit a brick wall in progression because you didn't collect enough LFR gear. Now you're saying you want us to force everyone to choose between LFR and normal difficulty each week, just because it's not mandatory to run both.

I don't understand the value in asserting that we're forcing you, by design, to make certain raid progression choices -- when we're actually not -- and then arguing we should more directly force everyone to make certain raid progression choices.

How badly are you really hurting your raid by not running LFR?

That's subjective as there is no true way to find out. Let's just assume a raid group of ten people each person has two pieces of LFR gear, that's a lot of extra stats across the raid and def helps against something like a elegon fight with tight enrages.[/i]
Right. So it's a choice you're making for every advantage in the game. Do you want every advantage possible in the game? 'Cause you have to put in extra effort for that.

That was in response to your second post in the thread Z, and ya buddy you knew what you were doing with it and got the responses you wanted of the 11/10 and lolol Zarhym owned that guy blah blah blah. It was rude and not an open dialogue.
You're making big assertions and suggesting (to put it mildly) that we change the lockout system for everyone. If you're serious about this change at all -- and not just trolling -- I reserve the right to review your reasoning in context in order to formulate an answer to your suggestion. In other words, regardless of what you think my job entails, I'd certainly be of less use if I can't even point out logical fallacies in design suggestions, for fear that that'd be rude.

If you'd rather me placate you and say "thanks for the suggestion," sorry. This is a discussion forum. The dialog goes both ways.

1) LFR will remain relevant through this particular tier because it is the first one.
LFR is relevant right now. For sure. My guild for an example is 3/6 H, and 25 man (so we get bonus loots), and at least a third of my raid could still use an upgrade from LFR just due to RNG. We're still going in there! And, when you release HOF and Terrace LFR, I will certainly be in there tons to grab my tier. I have to plan all these LFRs into my week. I know this is a unique situation right now because it is the very beginning of the expansion. I am hoping that you guys' plans to devalue LFR for raiders kick in in a couple tiers with the ilvl changes; however, at this very moment, you should really believe that raiders of ALL flavors are running it.
You're correct. That's why I said in my original post that I didn't want to argue semantics over, "Blizzard is forcing me to do this." Raid Finder absolutely provides a strategic advantage for progression raiders looking to increase their character power as quickly as possible, fill out set bonuses, etc. But yes, over the course of this expansion's lifecycle that should be diminished, particularly for Heroic raiders. The need to regularly run (meaning over the course of several weeks) the Raid Finder versions of upcoming Mists of Pandaria raids should feel far less crucial, if not nonexistent, for dedicated raid guilds.

2) Valor Points.
LFR represents a larger quantity of VP than even raiding. VP is important now for gear, and will be important in the future for our upgrade paths; the cap is pretty far away by design. As long as that holds true, and as long as LFR rewards so much VP, we'll all be running LFR.
Assuming we're talking about an above-average, organized guild, Challenge dungeons are mathematically the fastest path to the VP cap. Of course the difficulty isn't comparable between LFR and Challenge Modes, but a serious raiding guild can go into an organized five-player setting and get to the VP cap faster, as opposed to gambling with a random LFR queue or facerolling LFR with a full guild clear.

You don't even have to be anywhere near a record-breaking time to be getting more VP/minute than in LFR.

3) Not every HM raider hits a new tier in Best in Slot.
You guys are opening instances very quickly. I appreciate that we are being provided with lots of raids, but you must understand that there are tons of times when LFR - at that single moment in time - represents an upgrade path for a given raider even if they are clearing a lot of heroic mode bosses.
Absolutely, and that's okay sometimes. In my first post I said that one of our goals is to ensure that Raid Finder has a healthy pool of players from which to choose. Our goal isn't to make sure progression raiders never want or need to run LFR. Having experienced raiders queuing up is usually going to be a net gain for everyone (in terms of wait times, success rates, etc.). There is usually some benefit to most level-90 players running Raid Finder, but that's obviously very different from "forced content."

It kind of depends on your goals, your guild's goals, and what you want to get out of the game. I'll still assert that Raid Finder isn't a progression roadblock for those who prefer to stick with normal/Heroic raiding.

4) Procs and tier bonuses will be devalued, but once in a while there might come one that's OP.
You also assume that the ilvl change will completely devalue LFR gear. I hope this will be true, but I suspect the devs - who try as hard as they can - will still occasionally throw in a very op set bonus or trinket proc. These things just happen.
I definitely see your point, and even I've been involved in several discussions with the developers about this concept, so I know they discuss the itemization/progression model quite a bit in their daily lives.

Of note, we recently spoke about the Sigils for the legendary gem. Even in that case, they're watching closely and expect the LFR runs simply for more shots at the Sigils will tail off. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

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Thats why the system is being implemented, Taco. (I was going to call you baby, but it felt weird, I havent even bought you dinner, yet.)

They want Valor to still be useful to raiders during the final tiers like Dragon Soul (where most raiders were sitting on 20-25k valor with nothing to spend it on by the end)

Also, if they go by what they said in Beta, there will be no Valor Point vendors after the first tier. So this will be the only form of Valor spending in game. The feeling of buying super magical gear from a vendor seems weird. But exchanging the valor points for that same vendor to upgrade your gear seems a little more MMO-like.

Thats why the system is being implemented, Taco. (I was going to call you baby, but it felt weird, I havent even bought you dinner, yet.)

They want Valor to still be useful to raiders during the final tiers like Dragon Soul (where most raiders were sitting on 20-25k valor with nothing to spend it on by the end)

Also, if they go by what they said in Beta, there will be no Valor Point vendors after the first tier. So this will be the only form of Valor spending in game. The feeling of buying super magical gear from a vendor seems weird. But exchanging the valor points for that same vendor to upgrade your gear seems a little more MMO-like.

Yeah, makes sense. I think the Valor cost should be increased though for a practically free upgrade. I'm starting to like the idea now, though.

With the current Currency, even if you cap 1000 valor, you will only be able to upgrade a single piece with 750. Next week you will be able to upgrade one piece and be left with 500 VP, every 3rd week of valor capping, you will get an extra upgrade from the residual Valor from previous weeks.

At this rate, just to upgrade your 5 tier pieces, it will take 8 weeks. I think this is perfectly balanced, considering you have 15-16 slots. It will take more time than exists between tiers to max out gear.

---------- Post added 2012-11-02 at 10:19 AM ----------

@Quilzar: This may be the case for dps classes, but for healers, Trinkets are usually much more valuable than the weapon they are holding. Same for tanks. And on top of that, Tier pieces are going to be valuable for everyone. So there should be (read:should) some variety as to what pieces people are upgrading.

Again. You will get 1 upgrade per week, so you will have to be selective, but this will help even out gear a bit. It will also make it so that if there is a piece you are especially attached to (A trinket from a previous tier, for example), you can hold onto it through the next tier and not be completely gimping yourself.

However I do agree that some slots, like Bracers, necks, belt, and rings, might be left behind. However that would also depend on what stats they have. As a warrior, if my Tier chest has Haste/Hit and my Bracers have Crit/Mastery, Im probably going to prioritize the bracers simply because they are better for me. So hopefully it will work out better simply since itemization changes all the time. :]

2:1 for justice:valor seems a little off. You can only earn 1k valor a week, whereas farming out 1k justice takes very little time and there's no cap...

Justice is used for lfd blues valor is for raid epics. They aren't (so far) interchangeable. Since this feature is being released on a non raid patch there will be time to make changes as necessary without causing any "unfairness in progression" for the world firsters as they will most likely be done by 5.1

[/COLOR]@Quilzar: This may be the case for dps classes, but for healers, Trinkets are usually much more valuable than the weapon they are holding. Same for tanks. And on top of that, Tier pieces are going to be valuable for everyone. So there should be (read:should) some variety as to what pieces people are upgrading.

Trinkets would be 2nd on my list (and I am a healer).

So say 750 for upgrading a weapon
700 for a trinket
....
500 for a bracer.

See what I am trying to say?

The stat allocation on bracers is much lower than chests and legs for example (which is why they cost more VP right now).

Well I completely disagree, because of the fact that Itemization changes with every tier. Blizzard would then have to look at if they are putting too good of stats on bracers, rings, and necks, and in return, those pieces would be gimped even more because they are easier to upgrade.

Oh dear, I'm glad I stopped with raiding and just play WoW casually. Just playing the game for PVE achievements. Don't get me wrong, it's good they have implemented a way to use valor points for purchasing item upgrades. But just the "thought" itself if I was still raiding, this will be extra activity spending on farming for the benefit of (semi-) hardcore raiding. I couldn't stand the farming anymore, doing dailies or gathering herbs for pots/flask/food. Although if you are clearing raid instances, you wouldn't have the need to spend time on farming I assume. Maybe 1 or 2 more instances or a few dailies to cap valor points.

Last edited by DarkEmperor; 2012-11-02 at 10:41 AM.

Asking the question why Darkness exists, is a question that leads to Infinity.

Patch 5.1: Item Upgrades
Patch 5.1 will finally implement the item upgrade system that first appeared in beta. The same frame is being used now, with a background that matches the other Ethereal frames, making it likely that this will be another function performed by our Ethereal friends. The window title still says Valor Upgrade, but the game has support for Valor, Conquest, Justice, and Honor points upgrades.

It appears all items that are upgradeable can be upgraded by 8 item levels, but Conquest and Valor points will do it in two steps rather than all at once. The currency used to upgrade an item is set per item, so you cannot use Honor to upgrade Valor Points gear or any other type than what is set for the item.

Well I completely disagree, because of the fact that Itemization changes with every tier. Blizzard would then have to look at if they are putting too good of stats on bracers, rings, and necks, and in return, those pieces would be gimped even more because they are easier to upgrade.

Stat allocation does not change every tier it is very simmilar.

I should point out I do not mean what secondary stats the item has I mean how much of each stat the item gets (in comparison to gear of the same iLvL).

Bracers always have the least (they will have the least Int for example)

Chest and Legs always have the most (they will have the most Int for example)

This is why in the current buy from Vendors model Bracers only cost 1250 vp and chests and legs cost 2250 vp.

You will always get more bang for your 750 vp upgrading a chest slot

Why do you think chests and legs cost more VP right now?

Do you think everything should cost the same amount of VP from the vendors?

The real question is can you upgrade heroic Items? since Asians/Chinese can get 517's are we going to be able to get 509 / 513 / 517 items with upgrades on our heroic items to put them on par with their items?